POTEAU, Okla. -- A LeFlore County District Court jury had trouble Tuesday deciding on a sentence for convicted murderer Elvis Aaron Thacker but finally chose to spare him by recommending a life sentence.
Neither Thacker nor Bethany Ault-Pyle, the mother of murder victim Briana Ault, showed any emotion as the foreman of the six-woman, six-man jury read the verdict that rejected the death penalty and recommended Thacker be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
"We offered [life in prison] a year ago but they wouldn't accept it," Ault-Pyle said after court. "The death penalty is what we wanted, but this is OK."
"We go home and [Thacker] goes to jail," said her husband. C.W. Pyle. "He'll never go free. That's what we wanted."
The jury convicted Thacker on Friday of first-degree murder and forcible oral sodomy in Ault's Sept. 13, 2010, death. A fisherman found her nude body with her throat cut floating in a secluded pond just across the Arkansas line in Pocola, Okla.
Ault, 22, was from Fort Smith. Elvis Thacker, 28, and his brother Johnathen, 27, who also was charged in Ault's slaying, are from Crawford County.
Johnathen Thacker pleaded guilty in April 2014 to first-degree murder in exchange for testifying against his brother and to avoid the death penalty. He told jurors during his testimony he agreed to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
First Assistant District Attorney Margaret Nicholson said Johnathen Thacker is scheduled to be sentenced at 8:30 a.m. July 1.
Nicholson said District Judge Jonathan Sullivan will sentence Elvis Thacker on the murder and sodomy charges after a pre-sentence investigation, which she said probably will take about 30 days. Jurors recommended Friday that Thacker be sentenced to the maximum 20 years on the sodomy charge.
Nicholson said Tuesday that she was pleased with the sentence.
Gretchen Mosley, the head of Thacker's defense team, expressed relief in the jury's decision not to impose the death penalty.
"I'm glad the jury found reason to extend him mercy," she said.
At the close of the punishment phase of the testimony, jurors began deliberating at 10 a.m. Tuesday. After nearly three hours, jurors returned to court to inform Sullivan they were deadlocked and could not reach a decision.
Sullivan instructed jurors that if they could not decide, he would discharge them and sentence Elvis Thacker himself to prison for life without parole or life with parole. He then sent the jury back to deliberate further. The jury returned with its verdict about 20 minutes later.
Elvis Thacker's attorneys and one of his sisters, Sandra Whitlock of Van Buren, made emotional appeals to the jury to spare his life.
Whitlock read a statement, she said, to show jurors how special her brother is. In the home in which Sandra, Elvis and their other four siblings were sexually, physically and emotionally abused as children, her brother was someone she could talk to and receive reassurance that things would be better, Whitlock said.
After Elvis Thacker was thrown out of the home by his mother, he earned a welding certificate, found a job, lived on his his own and took care of his brothers, William and Johnathen, she said. He loved animals, was artistic and discovered at some point he had a daughter.
"He loves country music, Southern cooking and he has a huge sweet tooth," Whitlock said.
As she sobbed, she pleaded for the jury to spare her brother's life so Elvis Thacker's daughter could have a chance to be part of his life.
In her closing arguments, Mosley continued to impress on jurors the defense's theory that Johnathen Thacker killed Ault and blamed it on his brother. The jury rejected that theory in convicting Elvis Thacker.
Overcome with emotion as she spoke to jurors, Mosley said she found Elvis Thacker to be caring and nurturing, not the murderer the jury convicted him of being.
The only reason she said Elvis Thacker could have participated in the crime was out of some duty to his brother.
"It's because he wanted a family so bad," Mosley said. "It's because Johnathen is so sick, but Elvis loved him and he didn't have anybody and he needed him."
Nicholson told jurors not to lose sight of the fact that all the pain and suffering jurors heard about over three weeks of testimony was the fault of Elvis Thacker's killing of Ault for no good reason.
"All the tears that have been shed in this courtroom, how many have been for her?" Nicholson said.
In delivering its verdict on Elvis Thacker, the jury accepted as proven the three aggravating factors the state presented to justify the death penalty -- that he was previously convicted of attempted capital murder and kidnapping charges in Arkansas; that he killed Ault to avoid arrest and prosecution; and that the danger he would commit more violent crimes in the future made him a continuing threat to society.
State Desk on 05/04/2016